Metamodel Instance Generation: A systematic literature review

Modelling and thus metamodelling have become increasingly important in Software Engineering through the use of Model Driven Engineering. In this paper we present a systematic literature review of instance generation techniques for metamodels, i.e. the process of automatically generating models from a given metamodel. We start by presenting a set of research questions that our review is intended to answer. We then identify the main topics that are related to metamodel instance generation techniques, and use these to initiate our literature search. This search resulted in the identification of 34 key papers in the area, and each of these is reviewed here and discussed in detail. The outcome is that we are able to identify a knowledge gap in this field, and we offer suggestions as to some potential directions for future research.Comment: 25 page

09461 Abstracts Collection -- Algorithms and Applications for Next Generation SAT Solvers

From 8th to 13th November 2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09461 "Algorithms and Applications for Next Generation SAT Solvers" was held in Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts, slides or full papers are provided, if available

Simplification of UML/OCL schemas for efficient reasoning

Ensuring the correctness of a conceptual schema is an essential task in order to avoid the propagation of errors during software development. The kind of reasoning required to perform such task is known to be exponential for UML class diagrams alone and even harder when considering OCL constraints. Motivated by this issue, we propose an innovative method aimed at removing constraints and other UML elements of the schema to obtain a simplified one that preserve the same reasoning outcomes. In this way, we can reason about the correctness of the initial artifact by reasoning on a simplified version of it. Thus, the efficiency of the reasoning process is significantly improved. In addition, since our method is independent from the reasoning engine used, any reasoning method may benefit from it.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Tool Paper: A Lightweight Formal Encoding of a Constraint Language for DSMLs

International audienceDomain Specific Modeling Languages (dsmls) plays a key role in the development of Safety Critical Systems to model system requirements and implementation. They often need to integrate property and query sub-languages. As a standardized modeling language, ocl can play a key role in their definition as they can rely both on its concepts and textual syntax which are well known in the Model Driven Engineering community. For example, most dsmls are defined using mof for their abstract syntax and ocl for their static semantics as a metamodeling dsml. OCLinEcore in the Eclipse platform is an example of such a metamodeling dsml integrating ocl as a language component in order to benefit from its property and query facilities. dsmls for Safety Critical Systems usually provide formal model verification activities for checking models completeness or consistency, and implementation correctness with respect to requirements. This contribution describes a framework to ease the definition of such formal verification tools by relying on a common translation from a subset of ocl to the Why3 verification toolset. This subset was selected to ease efficient automated verification. This framework is illustrated using a block specification language for data flow languages where a subset of ocl is used as a component language

Recursion and Iteration Support in USE Validator with AnATLyzer

Also published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073) Model finders enable numerous verification approaches based on searching the existence of models satisfying certain properties of interest. One of such approaches is anATLyzer, a static analysis tool for ATL transformations, which relies on USE Validator to provide fine grained analysis based on finding witness models that satisfy the OCL path conditions associated to particular errors. However it is limited by the fact that USE Validator does not include built-in support for analysing recursive operations and the iterate collection operator. This paper reports our approach to allow USE Validator to analyse OCL path conditions containing recursive operations and iterate, with the aim of widening the amount of actual transformations that can be processed by anATLyzer. We present our approach, based on unfolding recursion into a finite number of steps, and we discuss how to take into account practical aspects such as inheritance and details about the implementation.This work has been supported by the Spanish MINECO (TIN2011-24139 and TIN2014-52129-R), the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (S2013/ICE-3006), and the EU commission (FP7-ICT-2013-10, #611125)

Clafer: Lightweight Modeling of Structure, Behaviour, and Variability

Embedded software is growing fast in size and complexity, leading to intimate mixture of complex architectures and complex control. Consequently, software specification requires modeling both structures and behaviour of systems. Unfortunately, existing languages do not integrate these aspects well, usually prioritizing one of them. It is common to develop a separate language for each of these facets. In this paper, we contribute Clafer: a small language that attempts to tackle this challenge. It combines rich structural modeling with state of the art behavioural formalisms. We are not aware of any other modeling language that seamlessly combines these facets common to system and software modeling. We show how Clafer, in a single unified syntax and semantics, allows capturing feature models (variability), component models, discrete control models (automata) and variability encompassing all these aspects. The language is built on top of first order logic with quantifiers over basic entities (for modeling structures) combined with linear temporal logic (for modeling behaviour). On top of this semantic foundation we build a simple but expressive syntax, enriched with carefully selected syntactic expansions that cover hierarchical modeling, associations, automata, scenarios, and Dwyer's property patterns. We evaluate Clafer using a power window case study, and comparing it against other notations that substantially overlap with its scope (SysML, AADL, Temporal OCL and Live Sequence Charts), discussing benefits and perils of using a single notation for the purpose

Optimierte Suche von Modellinstanzen UML/OCL-Beschreibungen in USE

National audienceKonzeptuelle Modelle sind ein wichtiges Element modellgetriebener Softwareentwicklung, sowohl in der Beschreibung von Systemen als auch in der Metamodellierung domänenspezifischer Sprachen. Zu ihrer Beschreibung haben sich UML und OCL (und angelehnte Sprachen) als ein de facto Standard durchgesetzt. Validierung und Verifikation der Modelle sind hierbei wichtige Instrumente zur Sicherstellung der Modellqualität. Die Sprache ASSL (A Snapshot Sequence Language) bietet die Möglichkeit durch imperative Programmierung auf Modellebene und Backtracking konforme Instanzen systematisch zu erzeugen. Der White-Box-Ansatz ASSL ergänzt Black-Box-Ansätze, welche die Modellinstanziierung durch Abbildung auf (bspw.) ein Problem der relationalen Logik lösen. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt, wie die durch ASSL-Programme aufgespannten Suchräume durch Ausnutzung der Modellabdeckung der OCL-Constraints und der Modellstruktur erheblich verkleinert werden können und gibt einen Ausblick darauf, wie bestehende Black-Box-Ansätze in ASSL integriert werden können, um innerhalb eines imperativen Rahmens Teilinstanziierungen deklarativ beschreiben zu können

On Formalizing UML and OCL Features and Their Employment to Runtime Verification

Model-driven development (MDD) has been identified as a promising approach for developing software. By using abstract models of a system and by generating parts of the system out of these models, one tries to improve the efficiency of the overall development process and the quality of the resulting software. In the context of MDD the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its related textual Object Constraint Language (OCL) have gained a high recognition. To be able to generate systems of high quality and to allow for interoperability between modeling tools, a well-defined semantics for these languages is required. This thesis summarizes published work in this context that employs an endogenous metamodeling approach to define the semantics of newer elements of the UML. While the covered elements are exhaustively used to define relations between elements of the metamodel of the UML, the UML specification leaves out a precise definition of their semantics. Our proposed approach uses models, not only to define the abstract syntax, but also to define the semantics of UML. By using UML and OCL for this, existing modeling tools can be used to validate the definition. The second part of this thesis covers work on the usage of UML and OCL models for runtime verification. It is shown how models can still be used at the end of a software development process, i. e., after an implementation has manually been added to generated parts, even though they are not used as central parts of the development process. This work also influenced the integration of protocol state machines into a modeling tool, which lead to publications about the runtime semantics of state machines and the capabilities to declaratively specify behavior using state machines